Backlands Page 13

  Emma quit arguing. “How long do you plan to hold me hostage?”

  “Until the doctor says you’re well enough to travel.”

  “It will take a day or more to bring him here.”

  “Evangelina can care for you.” He turned to Evangelina. “Will you?”

  “Sí, for as long as you and Emma wish,” she replied.

  “That seals it. Do you agree?”

  Emma nodded her acquiescence.

  “Good,” Patrick said. “Matt, you stick close, help your ma with whatever she needs, and do what Evangelina asks while I’m gone. You savvy?”

  “Yes, sir,” Matt replied solemnly.

  “I’m making horse tracks.”

  Emma grabbed his hand. “This really isn’t necessary,” she said softly, looking him squarely in the eyes, hoping he’d realize fetching the doctor was pointless.

  “Can your sawbones sit a horse?” he asked, fully aware of her meaning, refusing to believe it.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll take old Stony along and tie the doctor to the saddle if need be,” Patrick announced with a grin. “You take care, old girl. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Emma smiled back. “I’ll see you then.” Patrick left, and tears filled her eyes.

  “Are you crying, Ma?” Matthew asked.

  “No, I’m not,” Emma answered with a sniffle. “It’s just this darn cold.” But that wasn’t the case at all; it was the astonishing realization that Patrick truly did love her.

  ***

  For several hours after Patrick’s departure, Matthew sat at the foot of Emma’s bed reading a Western called Arizona Nights, a book of old cowboy stories told around a campfire, with some really super illustrations in it by an artist named N.C. Wyeth. It had been published in 1907, five years before Matt was born.

  “Are you going to sit there with your nose stuck in that book all day?” Emma asked.

  “Pa said to stay close,” Matt replied. Last night, he’d dreamt that he’d grabbed on to Jimmy as he was falling out of the tree and they both crashed to the ground dead. The fright of it woke him up. “Besides, I’m worried about you feeling so poorly.”

  “There’s no need for that.” Emma smiled and swung her twitchy legs to the floor. “It’s too nice a day to be cooped up inside. I’m going to sit on the veranda. In fact, you know what I’d like even more? If you and Evangelina will carry my mattress and bedding to the veranda, I’m sure the fresh air will help me clear my lungs. I can rest there while you show me all the tricks you and your pa have taught Patches.”

  Matt closed his book and nodded eagerly. “Wait until you see what he can do.”

  “Before you jingle your spurs, I want you to know I’ve decided to ask Evangelina to come home with us. Is that okay with you?”

  “You bet,” Matt said. “I like her a lot.”

  Very slowly, Emma stood. “Good. Now, I’m going to the baño and then to the veranda. You do know what a baño is, don’t you?”

  “Everybody knows that word,” Matt groaned as he left to find Evangelina.

  Alone in the privy, Emma coughed up thick brown phlegm from her waterlogged lungs. Every breath caused pain; every cough singed her throat. She was burning up, sweating profusely. She coughed until it turned into a rough, dry hack and finally, gratefully subsided. On the veranda, her mattress and bedding were laid out with her pillows plumped against the wall.

  She stood for a moment marveling at the Tularosa: the wind-rippled sands, the flat-bottomed arroyos, the fingertip lava flows touching soft, narrow sand hills decorated by scattered squawbushes, thickets of yucca with stalks ten feet high, the gray, empty alkali flats, all framed and enclosed by majestic mountains.

  She’d once read that treasure appeared only to those who did not seek it. She decided the same could be said of the stark beauty of the Tularosa. It always took her by surprise and captivated her.

  Below, at the hitching post, Matthew sat mounted on Patches, ready to begin his demonstration. Emma called for Evangelina to join her, and together they watched, applauding each successful maneuver Matthew accomplished. When he finished, Emma summoned up a whistle that left her breathless and Evangelina shouted, “¡Muy bueno!”

  Matthew grinned with pleasure, took his bow still ahorseback, and walked Patches to the corral.

  “He’s a fine boy,” Emma said. “He’ll need someone besides Patrick in his life to care for him after I’m gone.”

  “What are you saying?” Evangelina asked.

  “When Patrick asked, you said you would care for me as long as I wished. If I guaranteed your wages, would you do the same for Matthew?”

  “I would not work for Señor Kerney?”

  “Yes, you would. But I’d arrange for the money to be there so it would never be a burden on Patrick for you to stay on.”

  “How long would my job last?”

  “As long as you, Matthew, and Patrick want it to.”

  Evangelina hesitated. “I’m not sure.”

  “You must decide now,” Emma urged. “If you agree, I’ll send Matthew off to the mailbox with a letter to my banker.”

  “My father will be angry.”

  “But you will be an independent woman earning your own wages.”

  Evangelina covered her mouth and giggled like a schoolgirl at such an outlandish idea.

  “Well?”

  “I will do it.”

  “Thank you,” Emma said with great relief.

  At Patrick’s desk, she found pen, paper, and an envelope and stamp and quickly wrote to Henry Bowman. She sealed the envelope, gave it to Matt, and told him to take it to the mailbox at the end of the ranch road.

  “Pa said I’m supposed to stick close to you,” he argued.

  “Out here on the Tularosa, anywhere less than a day’s ride is close,” Emma rebutted. “If you make horse tracks at a lope, you’ll be back soon enough.”

  Matt balked.

  “Please do as I ask,” Emma said politely.

  “Okay,” he said. He kissed her check and hurried out the door.

  Emma turned to Evangelina and said, “I think it would be a very good idea to clean out the chicken coop and ask Patrick to buy some hens and a rooster.”

  “It is not too late to start a small garden,” Evangelina proposed.

  Emma beamed her approval. “An excellent idea. Let’s make a shopping list for his next trip to town. There are staples you desperately need for the pantry.”

  With Evangelina’s help, Emma prepared a shopping list and then wrote to Patrick informing him of her wish to have Evangelina care for Matthew and her arrangement to have his trust pay her wages.

  She handed the letter to Evangelina and said, “Make sure he gets this.”

  “You can give it to him upon his return,” Evangelina proposed.

  “I may forget,” Emma replied, pushing the sealed envelope back into Evangelina’s hand. If she did get to see Patrick once more, she didn’t want talk of money to tarnish the visit.

  ***

  Patrick returned in the morning with Emma’s doctor, David Mead Sperry. With great effort she was able to pull herself to a sitting position and put on a bright smile before they dismounted and reached the veranda.

  “I didn’t think you’d make it,” she said to Patrick.

  His eyes searched her face. “You should know better than that.”

  “I do.” She turned to Dr. Sperry. “Now that you’re here, please tell Patrick I can go home.”

  “Not so fast,” Sperry replied cheerily. Tired, sore, dusty, and hungry, he smiled at Emma as he dropped to one knee, took a close look, and said to Patrick, “Give us a minute or two alone, if you please.”

  “I’ll have Evangelina fix you up some grub,” Patrick said as he reluctantly walked to the kitchen
.

  Sperry felt Emma’s forehead. She was burning up, emaciated in the face, and flushed pink from her neck to her cheeks. Her pupils were dilated and of unequal size, a worrisome sign of a stroke.

  “I’m a tough old bird, Doctor,” Emma said weakly.

  “So it seems,” Sperry replied as he felt her pulse. It was rapid and erratic. “Your ex-husband is a very persistent fellow.”

  “I told him not to bother fetching you.”

  “He obviously didn’t pay attention.” Sperry listened to her heart and her lungs and took her temperature. She had a high fever, a collapsed lung, fluid in the other lung, and a heart that could stop beating at any second. “Did you faint or fall recently?”

  Emma nodded. “Yes, last night. I just collapsed. When I came to, Evangelina helped me back to my bed.”

  “Have you lost feeling anywhere?” Sperry asked.

  “My left side is numb and my vision is blurry.”

  “Okay.” Sperry took her pulse again. Her heartbeat slowed, spiked, paused, and spiked again.

  “I’m dying, doctor,” Emma whispered. “I can feel my body leaving me.”

  “Did you sleep at all last night?”

  Emma shook her head.

  “You’ll sleep soon,” Sperry said gently. “It won’t be long now.”

  “Good.”

  Sperry rose. At the kitchen door he called everyone to the veranda.

  Emma closed her eyes and smiled, remembering that when Cal lay dying she’d sent Gene Rhodes to fetch a doctor. Cal had argued it was a waste of time and money and proved himself right by dying two hours before Gene and the doctor arrived.

  Willpower last night had kept her alive waiting for Patrick’s return. Now she could let go. She wanted to let go.

  She opened her eyes. Patrick, Matthew, and Evangelina surrounded her. Patrick and Matthew held her hands. She barely felt their touch. Holding a rosary, Evangelina silently prayed. A fuzzy shape in the background against the Tularosa sky might have been Dr. Sperry.

  For an instant she panicked at the thought that she had something important to say, but words—all language—flitted from her mind. She smiled, closed her eyes, and vanished.

  10

  Former Lincoln County sheriff John William Owen, known to all as Jake, ranched on a small spread outside Corona that barely broke even in a good year. As sheriff, Jake had gained a name for himself as a crackerjack investigator. After leaving office, he’d parlayed his reputation into a moneymaking proposition that helped keep the ranch afloat by hiring out as a private detective on cases that caught his interest.

  Most of his work came by way of district attorneys, judges, and sheriffs around the state who needed someone to take on tough investigations no one else could handle. It was 1925, but the caliber of police work in New Mexico was still mired in the territorial years of the last century, except now most sheriffs rode in cars, not on horseback.

  Jake’s current case hadn’t come to him through the usual sources. Edna Mae Bryan, a woman from Mitchell County, Texas, had asked him to search for her missing brother, Vernon Clagett, who’d last contacted her by letter in 1920 while working at a ranch on the Tularosa. In it, he’d mentioned meeting a fellow named Pat Floyd, an old pal he’d known in Arizona, and his plans to return to Texas for a visit as soon as he saved some money.

  Because she hadn’t kept the envelope and couldn’t remember where it had been mailed from, Jake decided to start from scratch in Las Cruces, where Vernon had mailed an earlier letter to her.

  According to Edna Mae, her brother was an ex-convict, a drunk, and—due to the recent death of an aged uncle—sole heir to a hundred and twenty acres of land in West Texas, where an oil boom was making millionaires out of dirt farmers. In ’23 a well called the Santa Rita #1 in Big Lake had started it all. Chances were good that Vernon’s quarter section was oil rich, so he needed to be found alive or proved dead so Edna Mae could get on with the job of making herself and her kin wealthy.

  That was all the information Edna Mae had supplied, but Jake had done some letter writing to prisons in the Southwest and learned that thirty-some years ago Clagett served time in Yuma Prison for robbery and manslaughter. In with a copy of the prison records sent to him was a photograph of young Vernon, looking mean and tough.

  He began the search for Vernon in Las Cruces, showing his picture around at stores, speakeasies, hotels, and diners, but nobody remembered him from five years back. Likewise, the Pat Floyd moniker rang no bells. He tried the towns of Engle, Alamogordo, Tularosa, and Carrizozo with the same results before returning to his Corona ranch, where he outfitted himself for a tour of every ranch on the basin.

  In truth, he wasn’t at all hopeful of finding Clagett or Pat Floyd, who was most likely a drifting drunk like Vernon. Both were probably buried in unmarked graves somewhere in the West, never to be heard from or seen again. But Edna Mae was paying him top dollar, and she deserved his best effort to find the man or prove him dead.

  Jake knew the basin better than most men but was also wise enough to know that there were hideaways, cabins, old homesteads, and remote ranches he’d miss completely if he failed to get information and directions from stockmen along the way. He also knew using a motorcar to take him where he needed to go would be pure folly. The old trails and wagon roads would simply be too much for such a vehicle. So he began his journey in the midsummer heat ahorseback, riding along the eastern edge of the Tularosa traveling south, zigzagging back and forth from high country to flats, up and down canyons, stopping wherever folks lived to ask about Clagett and Floyd. After two weeks with half the job done and no results, he returned home, out of supplies and out of steam. He rested his ponies for a few days, caught up on chores, re-equipped, and set out again, this time drifting toward the western slope of the basin.

  He made several stops at ranches on the northern fringe, crossed the malpais to the low hills that ran up against Workman Ridge, rode south for a spell, and veered west to Estey City, a copper-mining settlement struggling to survive despite a lack of water. He questioned residents without success about Clagett and Floyd before turning south to camp for the night at Mills Ranch, nestled at the toe of the Oscura Mountains.

  In the morning, he crossed to Mockingbird Gap in the San Andres Mountains and began working his way down the eastern slope. At Dick Gilliland’s spread he was treated kindly to lunch, reminisced with Dick for a time about the cattle wars in the old days, and went on his way empty-handed, feeling less and less positive about finding Edna Mae’s missing brother. He rode into the Hightower Ranch headquarters late in the afternoon, weary from a long day in the saddle, and got invited to dinner.

  Addie Hightower served up her famous beef-and-bean casserole with homemade bread to soak up the juices, and Jake just couldn’t say no to seconds. Over coffee on the porch, Earl recalled that Patrick Kerney at the Double K had taken on a hired man some years back who might have been Vernon Clagett. Earl remembered the year, 1920, because he’d seen the man at the Double K the day Patrick had given a party for his ex-wife, who’d died soon after.

  Jake showed him Vernon’s photograph. After studying it for a while, Earl couldn’t decide if it was the same man or not but guessed it just might be. Jake raised Pat Floyd’s name to Earl, but it didn’t ring a bell. Nevertheless, Jake turned in for the night encouraged to have his first inkling of a lead since he’d started spending Edna Mae’s greenbacks to find her brother.

  ***

  At the chicken coop pen, Matt stopped cleaning bird droppings and watched the approaching rider. He was astride a pretty calico pony leading a sorrel packhorse. Because he had his hat pulled low, casting a shadow on his face, Matt couldn’t make him out. He looked lean and wiry and sat easy in the saddle.

  Pa had left home early to deliver some ponies to Engle for rail shipment to a ranch in Cimarron and wasn’t due back until evening. Matt called up t
o the house that a rider was coming and walked to the horse pasture fence to greet the visitor.

  The man drew rein at the gate, pushed back his hat, nodded, and said, “Howdy, I’m Jake Owen and I’m looking to speak with Patrick Kerney.” He had a bushy white mustache that covered his upper lip, a high forehead, and thick ears that stuck out from his head.

  “I’m Matt Kerney,” Matt replied. “My Pa’s not here right now, but light and sit a spell.”

  “Thank you kindly.” Jake eased out of his saddle. At the house, a pretty Mexican woman holding a toddler stepped onto the veranda. Jake tipped his hat and the woman waved in return.

  “When will he be back?” he asked.

  “In time for dinner,” Matt answered. “Are you looking to buy some ponies?”

  “After passing by some fine-looking colts in the pasture, I’m mighty tempted to do just that,” Jake answered genially. “No, I’m trying to find a man who hasn’t been heard from for some time, name of Vernon Clagett.”

  Matt nodded. “I know him. He worked for my Pa, but not for long.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “About five years ago?” Jake asked.

  “That’s right. He wasn’t too friendly around folks. Kept to himself mostly. He took off one night.”

  “You saw him leave?”

  “No, sir. My Pa said he asked for his wages and left.”

  “He just rode out at night?”

  “He didn’t have a horse, so he walked, I reckon,” Matt replied.

  Jake paused. Why would a hired man without a horse quit at night and just walk away, especially from a remote ranch miles from anywhere? He’d save that question for Patrick Kerney. “Are you sure of all this, son?”

  The question peeved Matt. He inclined his head in the direction of the woman on the veranda. “There’s no reason for me to lie. Ask her, if you don’t believe me.”

  “I’m not doubting you,” Jake said soothingly. “But remembering something from five years ago can make facts get hazy.”